BUILDING A SHARED DATA INFRASTRUCTURE FOR WORKFORCE IMPACT

The Lower East Side Employment Network (LESEN) is a New York City nonprofit composed of community-based workforce development organizations serving predominantly low-income, immigrant residents through job placement, training, and employment stabilization services. Despite more than two decades of convening and coordination, LESEN lacks a systematic, network-level data infrastructure to measure its collective impact. LESEN engaged the Capstone team to design a strategy for building a shared data and impact measurement framework that reflects LESEN’s role within NYC’s fragmented workforce ecosystem. The team conducted a partner survey and interviews, performed a cross-analysis of organizational data systems, completed a literature review on workforce networks and shared measurement, and developed a landscape analysis situating LESEN within the broader NYC workforce development system. Based on these findings, the team produced a comprehensive final report outlining recommendations to operationalize LESEN’s intermediary role, co-design a shared data framework, implement a centralized data management system, and establish structures for collaborative reporting and sustainable systems change.